It’s that time of the year. The Northern hemisphere looks forward to spring. The Southern hemisphere looks forward to fall. And everybody in martech and marketing operations looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards.

This will be our 10th edition of The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Wow, a decade of hundreds of martech stack slides: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. We’d love for you to join this martech community tradition with us this year.

To enter the 2024 Stackie Awards, all you need to do is create a single slide (16:9 aspect ratio) that illustrates your marketing stack — the collection of martech software that you use. Your slide can be as simple or as elaborate as you like. The best slides successfully communicate a clear concept about how your stack is organized and how it fits into your marketing operations.

Then just upload your slide by April 26, 2024. There is no fee to enter. On the contrary, we’ll make a $100 donation to UNICEF on behalf of every legitimate stack entered, up to a total of $10,000. We’ll the announce the winners at an online #MartechDay event on May 7, 2024, and release a deck of all the slides that were submitted.

“So wait, your headline says everybody wins?”

Well, only five entries will be selected as winning stacks: those that we subjectively believe contributed the most to the community. But everybody wins because we all get to learn from the complete collection of stack illustrations: what do the stacks look like at different companies and how do they think of them? Martech vendors win by getting recognized in the stack slides shared by their customers. And the donations made to UNICEF on behalf of these entries help in some small way with things more important than any stack.

Airstream, Autodesk, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Nationwide, Paychex, Philips, Sargento, SAS, United Healthcare, Verizon, Washington Post, and Whirlpool are some of the well-known brands that have shared their stacks in The Stackies. For example, here’s the entry from Juniper Networks in 2021:

Or, for a B2C example, this entry from Casey’s in 2023:

Or, one more example, this one from Rabobank in 2022:

You can have as much fun with your stack illustration as you like. But all three of these examples capture a sense of the journey — either for marketers or customers — in which these martech tools are used. I like Juniper’s and Casey’s, because they also break down the different categories of martech products they use and how they map to that customer journey or marketing production line.

But you don’t have to follow what they did. Any way you want to represent your stack, we’d be delighted to see it.

That said, every year I like to make a couple of suggestions for entries that I hope a few people will consider. This year, I’d love to see two things:

First, where is generative AI being used in your stack? For content creation? Data analysis? Customer service? Streamlined workflows? Idea generation? Are you using specific gen AI tools, or gen AI features built into larger martech platforms? If you can help us see the real-world use cases of AI, that would be a cool contribution.

Second, I’ve been writing about aggregation theory in martech stacks for the past year or so, how certain platforms unify data, workflows, user experiences, or governance across your company’s tech stack (i.e., not just limited to marketing). The quintessential example of this is a cloud data warehouse or data lake, such as BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, or Databricks, that aggregates data from many sources and makes it available to many apps to use. I’d love to see a few Stackies this year that illustrate real-world examples of this.

Are you using a cloud data warehouse as part of your martech stack. Please include it!

But you don’t have to constrain yourself with either of those ideas. More than anything, the Stackies are about educating each other about the different ways martech is implemented across industries and geographies. Whatever you want to teach with your stack slide, we’re ready and eager to learn. And we greatly appreciate the contribution.

Just be sure to send in your slide here by April 26, 2024. Time to get stackin’!